GLAM Project/Success Stories

From Wikimedia Hong Kong, the Local Wikimedia Chapter in Hong Kong

Photo Herbert von Karajan (1938) from Bundesarchiv

Here are some success stories of cooperation between Wikipedia and GALM institutions, in both categories of joint events and content partnerships.

British Museum

One of the results of the tour: part of the famous Bassae Frieze by Sarah Murray during the tour

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.

Backstage Pass tour

The British Museum host a backstage pass tour for local Wikipedian in June 2010. 18 articles were created on English Wikipedia, and 178 images were uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons as the result of the tour.

Featured Article prizes

The British Museum is offering five prizes of £100 (≈$140USD/€120) at their shop/bookshop for new Featured Articles on topics related to the British Museum in any Wikipedia language edition.

This is the first time an organisation in the UK has put out a prize that recognises the value of fine articles on Wikipedia. This is recognition that Wikipedia work is not only good quality but is consistent with the outreach aspect of the Museum's mission to engage the public. It is likely to have a positive effect for the Museum in terms of usage of the deeper resources and links back to their research material. It is a win–win situation for free cultural products, and more broadly for the cultural sector.

Bundesarchiv, Germany

76th generation descendant of Confucius meeting with German Officials in Tsing Tau (Qingdao), China (1910) , From Bundesarchiv

In December 2008, nearly 100,000 images from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The images were mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and were part of cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives. The images have since been extensively categorized on Wikimedia Commons, and integrated into Wikipedia articles.

As a result of making these images available on Wikipedia, they greatly increased the click-through rate to their website from Wikipedia, with the result that their revenue from poster sales substantially increased. They also received a large number of corrections to the image descriptions and additions to metadata from Wikimedia volunteers. They subsequently decided to hire a full time employee solely for integrating these corrections and additions into their archive.

Nationaal Archief, the Netherlands

Queen Juliana and her dog

The Nationaal Archief is the national archive of the Netherlands, located in The Hague. It houses collections for the central government, the province of Zuid-Holland, and the former County of Holland.

Spaarnestad Photo is an independent photo-archive located in Haarlem. Founded in 1985, its archives were included in the Nationaal Archief in 2008. In September 2010, the Nationaal Archief and Spaarnestad Photo donated more than 1,000 photographs about Dutch politicians and important events to Wikipedia. This was possible within the concept of Beelden voor de Toekomst (Images for the Future) project, which is all about preservation, digitization and making material publicly available. The specific donation was a result of cooperation between Beelden voor de Toekomst and Wikimedia Nederland. This donation was executed at the political press center Nieuwspoort in The Hague with several former and current politicians being present to share their memories with these photos.

Bibliothèque nationale de France

Snowscape byTang Yin (唐寅/唐伯虎) from Brooklyn Museum, Click here for Full resolution

Cover of À se tordre: Histoires chatnoiresques, an important work of French humorist Alphonse Allais

The Bibliothèque nationale de France is the National Library of France. Its mission is to constitute collections, especially the copies of works published in France that must, by law, be deposited there, conserve them, and make them available to the public. It is the most important library in France, and one of the most important in the world.

In April 2010, Wikimédia France signed an agreement with the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The library donated 1,409 digitised public domain works, taken from its digital library Gallica, so they can be proofread by contributors to Wikisource.

Wikimédia France retrieved in late April image files in TIFF format and OCRs. A team of three volunteers of Wikimédia France worked to transform them into DjVu format that can be used on Wikisource.The DjVu files were loaded on Commons by a system administrator of the Foundation on 10 July 2010. The books index were initialised by bot on Wikisource the same day.In August, the team worked to make use of the original TIFF files. The TIFF files were uploaded on Commons on 25 August 2010. Moreover, the OCR files provided by the BnF indicate the presence of graphical elements detected during the scanning. The team is currently looking into sorting the files and making them available to the community.

Brooklyn Museum, New York

The Brooklyn Museum in New York City is one of the largest in the United States. Its permanent collection includes more than one-and-a-half million objects.

On 12 April 2010, the Brooklyn Museum announced its project to cross-post images of its collection to Wikimedia Commons and Internet Archive. At that point, the Museum already planned to upload "5,157 primary object images and 4,354 Library & Archives images".

Discussions are ongoing between the Commons community and the upload bot operator, so that the upload will go smoothly.

An initial analysis was published in September 2010: Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?